Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.

His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a European trip.

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. (“I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm.) He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem Renaissance poetics.

Yet along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, and who has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D., the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

Wow. i usually don't give two thoughts when i hear some celebrity or musican dies, but i can't help but feel particularilly sad about this news. Gil was more than just a good artist or a musician. Nevermind that he was literally thee voice for the racial struggle and human rights issues of the late 60s 70s and beyond, but he possessed that ability to speak to every one of his listeners on a higher level than most other music out there. What i mean by that is whenever i listened to his work it totally engrossed me and drew me into the song (or poem) more than i can describe. What makes this even more difficult to take is that his album from just last year was so good and moving. I still get emotional when i hear some of those songs (broken home and i'm new here in particular). What a loss. I'll post some of my favorite songs when i have more time later.

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Some things juss stick with you, forever. And for me, this is one of them: I heard my first Gil Scott Heron song when I was 16yrs old, listening to the radio juss as I was finishing my grade11 year, wherein I was being picked on routinely & juss needed something to pick me up. And then I heard this song here: